This quarter, our Community column is dedicated to the review process of ACM Multimedia (MM). We report the summary of discussions arisen at various points in time, after the first round of reviews were returned to authors.

The core part of the discussion focused on how to improve review quality for ACM MM. Some participants pointed out that there have been complaints about the level and usefulness of some reviews in recent editions of ACM Multimedia. The members of our discussion forums (Facebook and Linkedin) proposed some solutions.

A semi-automated paper assignment. Participants debated about the best way of assigning papers to reviewers. Some suggested that automated assignment, i.e. using TPMS, helps reducing biases at scale: this year MM followed the review model of CVPR, which handled 1,000+ submissions and peer reviews. Other participants observed that automated assignment systems often fail in matching papers with the right reviewers. This is mainly due to the diversity of the Multimedia field: even within a single area, there is a lot of diversity in expertise and methodologies. Some participants advocated that the best solution is to have two steps (1) a bidding period where reviewers choose their favorite papers based on the areas of expertise, or, alternatively, an automated assignment step; (2) an “expert assignment” period, where, based on the previous choices, Area Chairs select the right people for a paper: a reviewer pool with relevant complementary expertise.

The authors’ advocate. Most participants agreed that the figure of the author’s advocate is crucial for a fair reviewing process, especially for a diverse community such as the Multimedia community. Most participants agreed that the author’s advocate should be provided in all tracks.

Non-anonymity among reviewers. It was observed that revealing the identity of reviewers to the other members of the program committee (e.g. Area Chairs and other reviewers) could encourage responsiveness and commitments during the review and discussion periods.

Quality over quantity. It was pointed out that increasing the number of reviews per paper is not always the right solution. This adds workload on the reviewers, thus potentially decreasing the quality of their reviews.

Less frequent changes in review process. A few participants discussed about the frequency of changes in the review process in ACM MM. In recent years, the conference organizers have tried different review formats, often inspired by other communities. It was observed that this lack of continuity in the review process might not give the time to evaluate the success of a format, or to measure the quality of the conference overall. Moreover, changes should be communicated and announced well before implemented (and repeatedly because people tend to oversight them) to the authors and the reviewers.

This debate lead to a higher-level discussion about the identity of the MM community. Some participants interpreted these frequent changes in the review process as some kind of identity crisis. It was proposed to use empirical evidence (e. g. a community survey) to analyse exactly what the MM community actually is and how it should evaluate itself. The risk of becoming a second tier conference to CVPR was brought up: not only authors submit to MM rejected papers from CVPR, but also, at times, reviewers are assuming that the MM papers have to be reviewed as CVPR papers, thus potentially losing a lot of interesting papers for the conference.

We would like to thank all participants for their time and precious thoughts. As next step for this column, we might consider making short surveys about specific topics, including the ones discussed in this issue of the SIGMM Records opinion column.

We hope this column will foster fruitful discussions during the conference, which will be held in Seoul, Korea, on 22-26 October 2018.

The discussion: multimedia data is affected by new forms of privacy threats, let’s learn, protect, and engage our users.

For this edition of the SIGMM Opinion Column, we carefully selected the discussion’s main topic, looking for an appealing and urgent problem arising for our community. Given the recent Cambridge Analytica’s scandal, and the upcoming enforcement of the General Data Protection Act in EU countries, we thought we should have a collective reflection on ‘privacy and multimedia’.

The discussion: multimedia data is affected by new forms of privacy threats, let’s learn, protect, and engage our users.

Users share their data often unintentionally. One could indeed observe a diffuse sense of surprise and anger following the data leaks from Cambridge Analytica. As mentioned in a recent blog post from one of the participants, so far, large-scale data leaks have mainly affected private textual and social data of social media users. However, images and videos also contain private user information. There was a general consensus that it is time for our community to start thinking about how to protect private visual and multimedia data.

It was noted that computer vision technologies are now able to infer sensitive information from images (see, for example, a recent work on sexual orientation detection from social media profile pictures). However few technologies exist that defend users against automatic inference of private information from their visual data. We will need to design protection techniques to ensure users’ privacy protection for images as well, beyond simple face de-identification. We might also want users to engage and have fun with image privacy preserving tools, and this is the aim of the Pixel Privacy project.

But in multimedia, we go beyond image analysis. By nature, as multimedia researchers, we combine different sources of information to design better media retrieval or content serving technologies, or to ‘get more than the sum of parts’. While this is what makes our research so special, in the discussion participants noted that multimodal approaches might also generate new forms of privacy threats. Each individual source of data comes with its own privacy dimension, and we should be careful about the multiple privacy breaches we generate by analyzing each modality. At the same time, by combining different medias and their privacy dimensions, and performing massive inference on the global multimodal knowledge, we might also be generating new forms of threats to user privacy that individual stream don’t have.

Finally, we should also inform users about these new potential threats: as experts who are doing ‘awesome cutting-edge work’, we also have a responsibility to make sure people know what the potential consequences are.

A note on the new format, the response rate, and a call for suggestions!

This quarter, we experimented with a new, slimmer format, hoping to reach out to more members of the community, beyond Facebook subscribers.

We extended the outreach beyond Facebook: we used the SIGMM Linkedin group for our discussion, and we directly contacted senior community members. To engage community members with limited time for long debates, we also lightened the format, asking anyone who is interested in giving us their opinion on the topic to send us or share with the group a one-liner reflecting their view on privacy on multimedia.

Despite the new format, we received a limited number of replies. We will keep trying new formats. Our aim is to generate fruitful discussions, and gather opinions on crucial problems in a bottom-up fashion. We hope, edition after edition, to get better at giving voice to more and more members of the Multimedia Community.

We are happy to hear your thoughts on how to improve, so please reach out to us!

In a nutshell, the community agreed that: we need more transparent communication and homogeneous rules across thematic areas; we need more useful rebuttals; there is no need for conflict of interest tracks; large conferences must protect preliminary and emergent research works. Solutions were suggested to improve these points.

Welcome to the first edition of the SIGMM Community Discussion Column!

As promised in our introductory edition, this column will report highlights and lowlights of online discussion threads among the members of the Multimedia community (see our Facebook MM Community Discussion group).

After an initial poll, this quarter the community chose to discuss about the reviewing process and structure of the SIGMM-sponsored conferences. We organized the discussion around 3 main sub-topics: importance of tracks, structure of reviewing process, and value of preliminary works. We collected more than 50 contributions from the members of the Facebook MM Community Discussion group. Therefore, the following synthesis represents only these contributions. We encourage everyone to participate in the upcoming discussions, so that this column becomes more and more representative of the entire community.

In a nutshell, the community agreed that: we need more transparent communication and homogeneous rules across thematic areas; we need more useful rebuttals; there is no need for conflict of interest tracks; large conferences must protect preliminary and emergent research works. Solutions were suggested to improve these points.

Communication, Coordination and Transparency. All participants agreed that more vertical (from chairs to authors) and horizontal (in between area chairs or technical program chairs) communication could improve the quality of both papers and reviews in SIGMM-sponsored conferences. For example, lack of transparency and communication regarding procedures might deal to uneven rules and deadlines across tracks.

Tracks. How should conference thematic areas be coordinated? The community’s view can be summarized into 3 main perspectives:

Rule Homogeneity. The majority of participants agreed that big conferences should have thematic areas, and that tracks should be jointly coordinated by a technical program committee. Tracks are extremely important, but in order for the conference to give an individual, unified message, as opposed to “multi-conferences”, the same review and selection process should apply to all tracks. Moreover, hosting a face to face global TPC meetings is key for a solid, homogeneous conference program.

Non-uniform Selection Process to Help Emerging Areas. A substantial number of participants pointed out that one role of the track system is to help emerging subcommunities: thematic areas ensure a balanced programme with representation from less explored topics (for example, music retrieval or arts and multimedia). Under this perspective, while the reviewing process should be the same for all tracks, the selection phase could be non-uniform. “Mathematically applying a percentage rate per area” does not help selecting the actually high-quality papers across tracks: with a uniformly applied low acceptance rate rule, minor tracks might have one or two papers accepted only, despite the high quality of the submissions.

Abolish Tracks. A minority of participants agreed that, similar to big conferences such as CVPR, tracks should be completely abolished. A rigid track-based structure makes it somehow difficult for authors to choose the right track where to submit; moreover, reviewers and area chairs are often experts in more than one area. These issues could be addressed by a flexible structure where papers are assigned to area chairs and reviewers based on the topic.

Reviewing process How do we want the reviewing process to be? Here is the view of the community on four main points: rebuttal, reviewing instructions, conflict of interest, and reviewers assignment.

Rebuttal: important, but we need to increase impact. The majority of participants agreed that rebuttal is helpful to increase review quality and to grant authors more room for discussion. However, it was pointed out that sometimes the rebuttal process is slightly overlooked by both reviewers and area chairs, thus decreasing the potential impact of the rebuttal phase. It was suggested that, in order to raise awareness on rebuttal’s value, SIGMM could publish statistics on the number of reviewers who changed their opinion after rebuttal. Moreover, proposed improvements on the rebuttal process included: (1) more time allocated for reviewers to have a discussion regarding the quality of the papers; (2) a post-rebuttal feedback where reviewers respond to authors’ rebuttal (to promote reviewers-authors discussion and increase awareness on both sides) and (3) a closer supervision of the area chairs.

Reviewing Guidelines: complex, but they might help preliminary works. Do reviewing guidelines help reviewers writing better reviews? For most participants, giving instructions to reviewers appear to be somehow impractical, as reviewers do not necessarily read or follow the guidelines. A more feasible solution is to insert weak instructions through specific questions in the reviewing form (e.g. “could you rate the novelty of the paper?”). However, it was also pointed out that written rules could help area chairs justify a rejection of a bad review. Also, although reviewing instructions might change from track to track, general written rules regarding “what is a good paper” could help the reviewers understand what to accept. For example, clarification is needed on the depth of acceptable research works, and on how preliminary works should be evaluated, given the absence of a short paper track.

Brave New Idea Track: ensuring scientific advancement. Few participants expressed their opinion regarding this track hosting novel, controversial research ideas. They remarked the importance of such a track to ensure scientific advancement, and it was suggested that, in the future, this track could host exploratory works (former short papers), as preliminary research works are crucial to make a conference exciting.

Conflict of Interest (COI) Track: perhaps we should abolish it. Participants almost unanimously agreed that a COI track is needed only when the conference management system is not able to handle conflicts on its own. It was suggested that, if that is not the case, a COI track might actually have a antithetical effect (is the COI track acceptance rate for ACM MM higher this year?).

Choosing Reviewers: A Semi-Automated Process. The aim of the reviewers assignment procedure is to give the right papers to the right reviewers. How to make this procedure successful? Some participants supported the “fully manual assignment” option, where area chairs directly nominate reviewers for their own track. Others proposed to have a “fully automatic assignment”, based on an automated matching system such as the Toronto Paper Matching System (TPMS). A discussion followed, and eventually most participants agreed on a semi-automated process, having first the TPMS surfacing a relevant pool of reviewers (independent of tracks) and then area chairs manually intervening. Manual inspection of area chairs is crucial for inter-disciplinary papers needing reviews from experts from different areas.

Finally, during the discussion, few observations and questions regarding the future of the community arouse. For example: how to steer the direction of the conference, given the increase in number of AI-related papers? How to support diversity of topics, and encourage papers in novel fields (e.g. arts and music) beyond the legacy (traditional multimedia topics)? Given the wide interest on such issues, we will include these discussion topics in our next pre-discussion poll. To participate in the next discussion, please visit and subscribe to the Facebook MM Community Discussion group, and raise your voice!

The interviews in the SIGMM records aim to provide the community with the insights, visions, and views from outstanding researchers in multimedia. With the interviews we particularly try to find out what makes these researchers outstanding and also to a certain extend what is going on in their mind, what are their visions and what are their thoughts about current topics. Examples from the last issues include interviews with Judith Redi, Klara Nahrstedt, and Wallapak Tavanapong.

The interviewers are conducted via Skype or — even better — in person by meeting them at conferences or other community events. We aim to publish three to four interviews a year. If you have suggestions for who to interview, please feel free to contact one of the column editors, which are:

Michael Alexander Riegler is a scientific researcher at Simula Research Laboratory. He received his Master’s degree from Klagenfurt University with distinction and finished his PhD at the University of Oslo in two and a half years. His PhD thesis topic was efficient processing of medical multimedia workloads.His research interests are medical multimedia data analysis and understanding, image processing, image retrieval, parallel processing, gamification and serious games, crowdsourcing, social computing and user intentions. Furthermore, he is involved in several initiatives like the MediaEval Benchmarking initiative for Multimedia Evaluation, which runs this year the Medico task (automatic analysis of colonoscopy videos, http://www.multimediaeval.org/mediaeval2017/medico/.

Herman Engelbrecht is one of the directors at the MIH Electronic Media Laboratory at Stellenbosch University. He is a lecturer in Signal Processing at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. His responsibilities in the Electronic Media Laboratory are the following: Managing the immediate objectives and research activities of the Laboratory; regularly meeting with postgraduate researchers and their supervisors to assist in steering their research efforts towards the overall research goals of the Laboratory; ensuring that the Laboratory infrastructure is developed and maintained; managing interaction with external contractors and service providers; managing the capital expenditure of the Laboratory; and managing the University’s relationship with the post­graduate researchers – See more at: http://ml.sun.ac.za/people/dr-ha-engelbrecht/#sthash.3SexKFo5.dpuf

Mathias Lux is associate professor at the Institute for Information Technology (ITEC) at Klagenfurt University. He is working on user intentions in multimedia retrieval and production and emergent semantics in social multimedia computing. In his scientific career he has (co-) authored more than 80 scientific publications, has served in multiple program committees and as reviewer of international conferences, journals and magazines, and has organized multiple scientific events. Mathias Lux is also well known for the development of the award winning and popular open source tools Caliph & Emir and LIRe (http://www.semanticmetadata.net) for multimedia information retrieval. Dr. Mathias Lux received his M.S. in Mathematics 2004, his Ph.D. in Telematics 2006 from Graz University of Technology, both with distinction, and his Habilitation (venia docendi) from Klagenfurt University in 2013.

Welcome to the SIGMM Community Discussion Column! In this very first edition we would like to introduce the column to the community, its objectives and main operative characteristics.

Given the exponential amount of multimedia data shared online and offline everyday, research in Multimedia is of unprecedented importance. We might be now facing a new era of our research field, and we would like the whole community to be involved in the improvement and evolution of our domain.

The column has two main goals. First, we will promote dialogue regarding topics of interests for the MM community, by providing tools for continuous discussion among the members of the multimedia community. Every quarter, we will discuss (usually) one topic via online tools. Topics will include “What is Multimedia, and what is the role of the Multimedia community in science?”; “Diversity and minorities in the community”; “The ACM code of ethics”; etc.

Second, we will monitor and summarize on-going discussions, and spread their results within and outside the community. Every edition of this column will then summarize the discussion, highlighting popular and non-popular opinions, agreed action points and future work.

To foster the discussion, we set up an online discussion forum to which all members of the multimedia community (expertise and seniority mixed) can participate: the Facebook MM Community Discussion group (follow this link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/132278853988735/) . For every edition of the column, we will choose an initial set of topics of high relevance for the community. We will include, for example, topics that have been previously discussed at ACM meetings (e.g., the code of ethics), or in related events (e.g., Diversity at MM Women lunch), or popular off-line discussions among MM researchers (e.g., review processes, vision of the scientific community…). In the first 15 days of the quarter, the members of the community will choose one topic from this short-list via an online poll shared through the MM Facebook group. We will then select the topic that received the higher number of votes as the subject for the quarterly discussion.

Volunteers or selected members of the MM group will start the discussion via Facebook posts on the group page. The discussion will be then open for a period of a month. All members of the community can participate by replying to posts or by directly posting on the group page, describing their point of view on the subject while being concise and clear. During this period, we will monitor and moderate (when needed) the discussion. At the end of the month, we will summarise the discussion by describing its evolution, exposing major and minor opinions, outlining highlights and lowlights. A final text with the summary and some relevant discussion extracts will be prepared and will appear in the SIGMM Records and in the Facebook “MM Community page”: https://www.facebook.com/MM-Community-217668705388738/.

Hopefully, the community will benefit from this initiative by either reaching some consensus or by pointing out important topics that are not mature enough and require further exploration. In the long-term, we hope these process will make the community evolve through large consensus and bottom-up discussions.

Let’s contribute and foster research around topics of high interest for the community!

Xavi and Miriam

Dr. Xavier Alameda-Pineda (Xavi) is research scientist at INRIA. Xavi’s interdisciplinary background (Msc in Mathematics, Telecommunications and Computer Science) grounded him to pursue his PhD in Mathematics and Computer Science, and a further post-doc in the University of Trento. His research interests are signal processing, computer vision and machine learning for scene and behavior understanding using multimodal data. He is the winner of the best paper award of ACM MM 2015, the best student paper award at IEEE WASPAA 2015 and the best scientific paper award at IAPR ICPR 2016.

Dr. Miriam Redi is a research scientist in the Social Dynamics team at Bell Labs Cambridge. Her research focuses on content-based social multimedia understanding and culture analytics. In particular, Miriam explores ways to automatically assess visual aesthetics, sentiment, and creativity and exploit the power of computer vision in the context of web, social media, and online communities. Previously, she was a postdoc in the Social Media group at Yahoo Labs Barcelona and a research scientist at Yahoo London. Miriam holds a PhD from the Multimedia group in EURECOM, Sophia Antipolis.